As WWII drew to its close, Strauss felt he was seeing not only the fall of Germany, but the fall of civilization, and poured his deeply felt emotions into the intensely wrought Metamorphosen. Opening the program is Erwin Schulhoff’s probing and unsettled Sextet, written between the two world wars. More than 150 years earlier, Mozart wrote his Sinfonia Concertante, here heard in a metamorphosed version itself, as a string sextet.